


There Must Be Other Rivers

by cadenzamuse



Category: xkcd 1190 (Time)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 23:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1099802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadenzamuse/pseuds/cadenzamuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can trees live under the sea?” he asks.</p><p>“I don’t think so,” she says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Must Be Other Rivers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladysorka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysorka/gifts).



She misses home more often now that she can’t go back.

Sometimes, he makes it worse. “What do you think happened to the animals?” he asks. They are sitting by a tide pool at the new edge of the sea.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Probably a lot of them died.”

“Maybe,” he says. “Some of the little ones have come back. Maybe they went up the river like we did.”

She pokes at the sand in the pool with a stick. The pool looks empty now, but they have seen crabs that look familiar once or twice. The stick is from a new type of tree.

“Maybe,” she says. The tree they took the stick from has stubby green spines instead of leaves. When it first grew, it lived high up in the mountains. It probably doesn’t like being next to a sea.

It might die.

“Can trees live under the sea?” he asks.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“What happens to trees at the bottom of the sea?”

She doesn’t want to think about it.

*

Food is tricky.

“I should have stolen a guide to mountain food from the people in the castle,” he says. They are exploring the hills near their new home. The spiny trees near the water are starting to look sick, but the same kind of tree grows in the hills too. These are covered with berries.

The berries are bright red and cup-shaped, with a green egg at the bottom of the cup. He takes a handful.

“Just eat one to start,” she says.

He chooses one that is the same size as the tip of his little finger. “It’s good,” he says. “It tastes sweet. But the green part is really bitter.” He spits the half-chewed center out. “Do you want one?”

“We should wait and see what happens first.”

He folds the berries in a cloth and puts them in his bag. “Let’s keep going.”

They walk.

Soon, he says, “My stomach feels bad. I don’t think those berries were good to eat.”

“Should we turn around?” she asks.

“Probably,” he says.

A little while later he pauses to throw up, so they stop for the night. His skin feels too hot under her hand.

“I think those berries were really bad,” she says. She takes the rest of them out of his pack and drops them on the ground.

In the morning, he is no longer shivering, and he keeps down the water she gives him.

“You saved me again,” he says.

“Next time we’ll stick to fish,” she says.

*

All forty of them survived. The creepy scholar said that wasn’t possible. She tells him that.

“I think the scholars were wrong about a lot of things,” he says.

“They were right about a lot of things too,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says.

Their people have built new tents near the river and the sea. Winter is much colder than it was in their old home. Food is hard to find. Some trees start to lose their leaves.

“Are they sick?” he asks.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “The spiny trees are still green. Maybe this is the way trees work here.”

“I wish we had more time to ask,” he says. “Even if the scholars were wrong about us.”

“Yeah,” she says, meaning it.

*

It gets warmer again. She thinks there might be more animals now.

She watches the girl with the hat teach people to swim in the new sea. They have to work a lot harder to swim now. They move their arms and legs a lot more.

When they finish, the girl with the hat comes to sit next to her. The shore is made of dirt, like a riverbank.

“You did a good job,” she says to the girl.

“I’m going to teach them to swim in rivers next,” the girl says. “When you stop trying to float, it’s really easy.”

“Do you miss being able to float?” she asks the girl.

“Sometimes,” the girl says. “But I like doing new things. I want to do everything!”

She smiles. “This is a good start.”

“This isn’t new to me. I’m just teaching other people to do it too.”

“Yeah. But that’s what the first part of doing everything looks like.”

*

“I miss our castle,” she admits.

“I do too,” he says. “The dirt here doesn’t work so well for castles.”

“It works better for houses, though,” she says. “Sand doesn’t stick together right when it gets dry.”

“Or really wet,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Dirt works better for a lot of things.”

“Just not for castles,” he says.

*

The second winter is easier. The girl with the hat makes a big house from mud and wood and then teaches everyone else to make them. It’s warmer inside the houses than it was in the tents.

She passes the girl on the way down to the river. “You did another new thing,” she says.

“I know!” the girl says. “I rubbed some salt on dried meat and it didn’t go bad! I’m going to try to get more salt out of the seawater. Then we can store lots of food for a long time!”

“We’ll take some with us when we go to learn new things,” she says.

“Are you going away again?” the girl asks.

“Maybe,” she says.

*

“Does it rain on the sea?” he asks.

“That wasn’t why the sea was rising,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “But it could still happen. And now that the sea is so big, rain wouldn’t make it grow much. We wouldn’t notice.”

“The sea can evaporate,” she says. “So even if it does rain on the sea, the water would go away again eventually.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“How big is the sea?” she asks.

“A lot bigger than it used to be. Ten times bigger, maybe.”

“That’s a lot,” she says. “The sea was already big.”

“The map says there’s land on the other side of the sea,” he says. “Do you think it’s different there?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> I have chosen not to use One True Thread or xkcd Time Wiki names or terms in this fic.
> 
> The berry that Cueball eats is from a European yew. They grow at many altitudes in the Mediterranean, and the seed in the center is poisonous.
> 
> Many thanks to [redacted], who literally sat beside me and held my hand through portions of this fic.


End file.
